The 14-Day Author Ad Profit Challenge
Day 3: How to Read the Ad Dashboard and Choose the Best Categories for Your Book
Brought to you by Bryan Cohen’s Author Ad School
Here’s What You’ll Learn Today
- How to read the most important info on your ad dashboard
- How to find and choose the best categories for your books
Quick Tip: Ad Dashboard Stats
When you’re getting started with Amazon Ads, one of the ways to avoid getting overwhelmed is to focus on just a few key ad stats.
Impressions are when a potential reader sees your ad come up in a search, on a sales page ad carousel, or on their phone (and you aren’t charged when a new reader simply sees that ad).
Clicks are when that potential reader clicks or taps on the ad and reaches your book’s sales page, which will then charge you at or below the price you set for your bid (we recommend setting your bid at 34 or 39 cents, so you’ll be charged at or below those amounts).
Ad Spend tallies up all of the money you’ve spent for those clicks for your campaign and the account as a whole (and we eventually want to compare that Ad Spend to our Royalties over on the KDP Dashboard).
There are other stats on the Ad Dashboard, but when you’re at this stage of the game, there is not much need to pay attention to things like ACoS, Orders, Sales, Top of Search Impressions, etc.
Impressions and Clicks
When you see that an ad campaign has registered impressions, this means that the ad is being seen on Amazon and new readers are coming into contact with this information about your book (so, every impression is a win!).
You’ll only see clicks on a campaign if it’s gotten impressions first. Typically, you won’t see a click until you’ve reached 1,000 to 2,000 impressions as part of an ad.
We recommend lower bids for this Challenge to keep the cost of your ad campaigns down, but this can lead to fewer Impressions and clicks when you launch new campaigns. This means that it’s totally normal for some campaigns to get few or even zero impressions even after a few weeks (keep in mind, creating the ads themselves is something to celebrate).
Metadata #1: Book Categories
The best way to ensure that your book is in the most relevant categories is to research them on a site like BkLnk.com or with Publisher Rocket software and then select those categories on your KDP Bookshelf. You can only manually set your own categories for your ebook and paperback (with a maximum of three per edition).
To ensure that your book has the best chance of getting low-cost clicks, you need to choose three categories based on how good of a fit they are (would they show up on the same shelf as these books?).
Bank Over Rank
It’s tempting to try to pick smaller categories so you have a chance at ranking #1 in that subgenre, but this is an old tactic that’s at odds with making your book’s metadata more relevant.
At Author Ad School, we recommend keeping your focus on Bank (relevant categories that will give your books their highest chance of sustainable profit) over Rank (hitting that #1 status in a category that may not contribute to your long-term success).
By making this future-focused choice now, you’ll set your books up with a strong foundation for profitability and growth
Picking Better Categories
On Amazon, hunt down the 3-5 bestselling books that are very relevant to yours (you may need to look at reviews and read the “Look Inside” to know for sure).
Open a spreadsheet or word document, and list those bestselling book titles as well as their ASIN (Amazon product number). You can find a book’s ASIN on Amazon by scrolling down to the details or by looking in the URL (www.amazon.com/Self-Publishing-Amazon-Ads-Authors-Royalties-ebook/dp/B09WYC47NJ). For my book on Amazon Ads, you can see the ASIN is “B09WYC47NJ.”
Go to BkLnk.com, click on “Author Tools” and then “CATFINDER” and scroll down to the box where you can add in a book’s ASIN.
Copy one of the ASIN numbers from your document or spreadsheet and paste it into the box. Scroll down to see the categories for that book, copy them into your document or spreadsheet, and repeat the above steps for the other books.
From there, you’ll look at the bestseller lists for each of those categories and see which three (and only three) are the best fit for your book.
Want to See How to Find Stats and Improve Your Book’s Categories?
Be sure to watch the screen share at MM:SS to follow along with the visual portion of this lesson!
Day #2 Homework
- Conduct research on BkLnk.com to start finding categories that could be relevant for one of your books
- Start by looking at some bestseller lists that have books that look similar to yours. Searching “Amazon top 100 (category name)” will bring those up
- Choose 3-5 books that are relevant to your own and use the BkLnk.com Catfinder (or Publisher Rocket) to see what categories those books are in
- Do you think any of the categories you’ve discovered would be a better fit than any of your current categories?
- You can list the categories you’ve found and your answer in a new post in the Facebook or Slack group with the #AdDay3 (and please comment on two other posts to spread the love!)
On the Next Day of the Challenge
We’ll learn how to set up a Sponsored Product Category Ad campaign.
We’ll also discuss the best way to focus on only the most relevant categories for your ads.
It’s time to go off and do the homework we know and love.
Thank you for watching, and I look forward to seeing you in the next video!
Sincerely,
Bryan & the Team